Internet commerce companies, and increasingly businesses in general, entrust their business-critical information to highly-reliable information processing systems. These information processing systems typically include arrays of disk drives that store the business-critical information. These disk drives are also designed to be highly reliable. In an information processing system, a computer usually processes the business-critical information while in communication with the disk drives over a coupling such as a network. In order to communicate with the disk drives over the network, the disk drives have traditionally been identified using a network address or similar.